When you co-write a thriller novel with James
Patterson, certain rules apply.
Rule No. 1 for collaborating
with the world’s best-selling author: Chapters must be short, with detailed
descriptions, flashbacks or other digressions strictly forbidden.
Rule No. 2: The villains, who
tend to drive the plots, must be at least as interesting and believable as the
heroes, if not significantly more so.
Rule No. 3: If any disagreement arises, it’s
Patterson who has the last word — literally and otherwise.
“He’s the boss, and I have no problem with that,”
says Mark Sullivan, 54,
who has co-written three novels in Patterson’s globe-trotting “Private” series
about the intrepid agents of a high-tech investigative firm with offices in
various world capitals. The next book in the series, “Private Berlin,” will be
published on Monday by Little, Brown. “Jim is the smartest story person — the
quickest read, the most insightful critic — I’ve ever been involved with. He
has an amazing ability to see flaws in stories, or to come up with a way to
take the story to a whole new level. He doesn’t say much, but the stuff he says
is just spot-on. I tell my wife, ‘It’s like going to study with Yoda.’ ”
“Private Berlin” by James Patterson and Mark
Sullivan. (Little, Brown and Company/LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY)
Besides, Sullivan reasons, a writer who has sold 275
million books (including a world record 53 No. 1 bestsellers) has to be doing
something right, even if the critics who wax rhapsodic over Lee Child, Walter
Mosley, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane don’t always agree.
“He knows more about the
publishing business than anybody I’ve ever known,” says Sullivan, a former
investigative reporter at the San Diego Union-Tribune who has written eight
novels on his own, including 2012’s “Rogue.” “There
are people who criticize Jim, but I’m an ambitious guy, and I always believed
that I could be a big, best-selling writer. I’ve had spurts of that, but not
what I wanted. To use the analogy of tennis, I always wanted to play Centre
Court at Wimbledon, and one day the world’s top-ranked doubles player called
and said, ‘You want to play at Centre Court?’ ”
In a phone interview from his home in Palm Beach,
Fla., Patterson bristles at criticism of his collaborative process, which some
have suggested amounts to an assembly line in which the supervisor is minimally
involved — “the factory and all that crap,” says the 65-year-old author.
“When people actually come up in my office and wander
around here, looking at 40 manuscripts lying around, they see that it’s an
artist’s studio, and all this stuff about it being a factory goes by the
wayside. They see how involved I am in these things, and what a maniac I am.
. . . If it’s a factory, it’s a factory where everything is hand-tooled.”
‘This isn’t going to fly’
In most of his collaborations with about a dozen
authors, Patterson says he begins the process by making a detailed outline of
around 70 pages. After that, the collaborator sets about producing a draft,
sending him pages about every two weeks for feedback. Finally, Patterson takes
over, producing one to five new drafts until he’s satisfied.
His partnership with Sullivan on the “Private” books
— including “Private No Prisoners,” to be published later this year — is a bit
unusual. Unlike most of the co-writers, Sullivan participated substantially in
crafting the outlines; in the case of “Private Berlin,” he largely wrote the
outline under his mentor’s watchful eye.
“Mark is great to work with — very bright, very
reasonable, and he works very hard,” Patterson says. “He gets in there and
chops wood, and I really like that. I don’t like to work with lazy writers.
That’s one of the problems I have with working with writers in Hollywood. Oh,
man, they just want to have lunches and stuff! That’s not true of all the
writers out there, but there’s just so many who want to worry about stuff
forever rather than just sit down and write the damn thing.”
James B. Patterson, American author of thriller
novels, largely known for his series about fictional psychologist Alex Cross,
the Alex Cross series. (Joshua Prezant/JOSHUA PREZANT © 2013)
That isn’t to say that the Patterson-Sullivan
collaboration has been an entirely bump-free ride.
“He trusts me, and I’m flattered by that, but he has
saved me multiple times from my own excess or my own lack of insight,” Sullivan
says by phone from his
home in Bozeman, Mont. “At certain times when I’ve really been on, Jim’s
turned me loose. He’ll say, ‘This is the story we envisioned — run, and just
keep running with it.’ Other times, he’s had to step in and say, ‘This isn’t
going to fly — we’ve got to go back and look at the outline again before this
gets too far afield.’ Or there’ll be something missing about the characters,
usually the villains.”
Ah, the villains.
“That’s sometimes difficult for the co-writers to get
a grasp on,” Patterson says. “There’s a tendency not to make the villains as
flesh-and-blood as the other characters. There’s a tendency to caricature, and
to me, even if the villains are doing outlandish things, I want to feel them as
human beings. Otherwise it’s not as satisfying a read.”
In “Private Games,” for example, the obsessed, delusional
villain needed to be humanized, at least to a point. This is a man who early in
the novel favorably compares himself to “supermen” such as Jesus Christ, Julius
Caesar, Abraham Lincoln “and Adolf Hitler” before cutting a man’s throat “with
such force that his head comes free of his neck all the way to his spine.”
It’s a weak spot for Sullivan, as he freely admits. “I
met lots of criminals as a reporter, and talked to many of them, but to
understand them? I really have to work hard to do that, in a way that I don’t
have to work to understand heroes. I get heroes. But I’m not a criminal, and I
don’t have that sort of background that leads you to criminality. But as Jim
will tell you, the villain has to be the equal or the better of the good guy
for the story to work.”
In “Private Berlin,” the primary villain “originally
didn’t have the kind of deep background that he eventually acquired,” Sullivan
says. “To
drive this kind of book, he has to be a phenomenal villain, but he
wasn’t as fascinating as we wanted him to be, [Whatever that means.] and Jim
kept pounding that issue, kept pushing me to figure out more and more about
him. When I started writing him down and putting him on paper, it was really
hard, because I had to get into the mind of a guy who’s a brutal torturer and
murderer. But it’s what had to happen.”
‘I’m always looking for pace’
Perhaps the biggest adjustment that any new co-author
has to deal with is Patterson’s insistence — some would say at the cost of
literary values — on brief, streamlined chapters with a minimum of descriptive
prose. “I’m always looking for pace,” he says unapologetically. “I always want
to make sure that the book is moving along.”
This emphasis, which has become the author’s
trademark, started many years ago when he stopped to re-read pages of an early
draft of 1988’s “The Midnight Club”.
“I’d been planning to go back and flesh the book out
a lot, but I realized that I kind of liked it without an overabundance of
detail, which was a convention of a lot of fiction,” Patterson recalls. “It was
much more the way we tell stories colloquially: We just put in enough to keep
the story moving, to keep people from walking away from us in the middle of a
sentence. And I kind of adopted that as my style, using just enough detail to
put you in the place or allow you to see the scene, convey the information that
needs to be conveyed, and that’s it.”
Although Patterson didn’t give Sullivan “a straight
formula,” as the latter puts it, there was a clear mandate for short chapters
that typically consist of a single scene.
“The idea is to cut as close
to the rising action of every scene, every chapter,” Sullivan says. “When you
do that, and you’re thinking of chapters as scenes, with a definite goal and
purpose, the chapters tend to be shorter. It’s true that the chapters in my
books tend to be longer, but I’m collaborating with Jim, and that’s his style.
But I’ve talked to a lot people about Jim’s books over the years, and that’s
one of the things they love about them. People are harried these days — even
diehard readers don’t have the time they want — and they can work their way
through one of these books in a way you couldn’t if you were picking up an
800-page epic saga.”
Get in and get out, in other words. Then make your
way straight to the bank.
Nance is a freelance writer.
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